


Talk

by orphan_account



Series: vervi time [1]
Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kinda, M/M, Pre-Relationship, cyborg vergil and android v babey!, im bad at tagging
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-09 03:29:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20480972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Vergil is a cyborg, and had to grow up alone in a city that he saw change in front of his eyes, and that doesn't forgive. He had to leave his humanity behind him long ago.But lately, he has been traveling with a defective Android.{ For VerV Week, with Prompts: You and I are Different, Humanity }





	Talk

**Author's Note:**

> HAPPY VERVI WEEK THIS IS BAD AND RUSHED and i really wanted to do something with the cyberpunk genre that wasn't "uuuh technology bad having robot parts doesn't make you human!!11!!!1!" and i wanted to include a more lengthy talk on transhumanism but i have a reparation exam tomorrow and it was study time can i please get an f so yeah this is also unedited
> 
> enjoy ig!

It has been a long time since the streets of Redgrave have seen the last ray of sunshine pass through the clouds of smoke, before completely leaving the city in its own aura of neon lights. At least Vergil could distinguish night and day before, and not constantly wander in the dark for any new scrap of metal that might be needed for his next cybernetic implant. As he walks through the dirty streets, titanium hands grapping the sides of his cloak and boots getting soaked in rainwater mixed with oil, he can already imagine the comments V will recklessly spit out after seeing him with his new leg. He had to pay a lot for it, but this one is way better: it will give him more speed, strength and flexibility, all things needed to survive what Redgrave has become.

There is nothing left of the big but simple city that Vergil grew up in before his father thought it would’ve been a good idea to let Mother, Dante and him go live in the HQ of his own corporation – then he disappeared, and Mother had to take the reins of what was left, doing all she could to keep the name of Father alive in a city that was becoming more corrupted and dark by the minute. Their job was to give all needed cybersecurity to other big company names of Redgrave, and yet…

And yet, the building was lit up in flames, his mother gone, and now while he’s sure – he _knows_ – that Dante is probably some wasted rockerboy getting also paid to take care of every single android problem in any corner of the city, Vergil wonders if that is really a problem – shouldn’t his own kind—no, _humans_, learn something from them?

He promised himself he would’ve left all of that behind, after all. How else is he going to survive if he doesn’t? Didn’t anyone learn about anything while living in this hell of a city?

Ah, he knows that V would just smile in that so, so smug way if he heard him right now. An android, of all things. A defective one, but as much as Vergil hates to admit it to himself, he needs him. He has the information Vergil needs about that one time he decided to work with a Corp just for more cybernetics, but instead they repaid him with a bounty after he discovered which one was the gun company that helped his enemies set fire to the building that night, and proceeded to act as he always wanted to since it happened: by killing the CEO. Serves him right, he’ll never work with anyone again, what he needs from V is just a guide to lead him to the right place.

When he’s in front of the right door, he simply opens it enough to slip inside the place and immediately closes it behind himself with care – sometimes the cybernetics acted up, and only he knows how many doors were incidentally broken by the strength that his body now possesses.

He lets the cloak fall to the dirty floor, and moves the first steps into the house.

They are lucky that they found somewhere to stay away enough from the Centre, honestly. All Corps are starting to get way under everyone’s skin with their constant patrolling of the city, and you couldn’t _just_ leave Redgrave without attempting for your life. They need a plan, and place to stay, and this dirty abandoned apartment came to them like a saving grace. Vergil only needed some intimidation tactics to have the previous “owners” – gang members, but the littlest of the fishes swimming in the intricate criminal life of Redgrave – leave running for their life and screaming to “please, don’t kill [them]!”. Pathetic would have been an understatement.

He’s not surprised to find V when he finally enters the living room, but he wouldn’t have expected to find him sitting on the floor, and much less, Vergil wouldn’t have expected his organic life sensor to basically skyrocketing inside his brain, causing almost an instant headache.

The room’s walls are of a maybe once bright green color that washed away with time, almost all the furniture gone except for a broken sofa and a coffee table, and the giant, broken projector-window that shows what absolutely wasn’t the outside world: a bright, colored garden. Sometimes the vision will fickle like a candle hit by the wind, waves of light moving fast and revealing the brick wall behind it. But there is a window, a small one, near what would have been the tv screen: V is sitting in front of it, back bended as he is surely doing _something_, it’s just difficult to decipher exactly _what_. There is a sound of metal hitting and there is a little bit smoke rising and a faint light with the only other one in the room, hanging above their heads – then, Vergil sees it.

There is a small nest sitting on the window, and a bird of equal size resting in it. From how it moves, it seems to be in pain, and starts chirping loudly right the moment Vergil looks as the scene. His eyes move to V, then to the bird, then to V again, who finally turns around with a completely neutral expression. – Ah, there you are. – He looks away from him again. – I was worried you encountered some of our common enemies.

Vergil goes to almost unsheathe Yamato, his energy sword, _almost_. His hands remain wrapped around the hilt as he grits his teeth. – Organic animal life? In _this_ city?! V, as you sure that isn’t a _bugged bot—_

\- It’s not, Vergil – V replies immediately. – I have biosensors as you do. I do think they caught this little one right here, as mine did. – He smiles slyly. – Unless they are obsolete, aren’t they?

As much as he would’ve loved to wipe that little smile off his face, Vergil can’t argue. No, that bird is the only natural life in there, and it’s real – not counting himself of course, he stopped doing that ages ago.

He sighs then, as he lets the hilt go. Why does one of this damned android’s defects have to be sarcasm, of all things…

Vergil starts to take more light steps into the room then, and he ends up looking down on V, directly at what he’s doing. The point of his red index finger is colored of a soft orange hue, and he’s now holding what looks to be a small cross made of two, thin metal pieces. V still isn’t looking at him. – Do you have something at least akin to a wire, or a piece of cord, perhaps?

Vergil ignores the question, sitting beside V, on his knees, and still looking at his finger with extreme fascination: - Is that… a melting tool of sorts? Did they build small gadgets within your system to repair yourself?

\- Yes. – Vergil is sure that, if V’s eyes had any emotion at all, he would see some irritation. – Now, a cord. _Please_.

Vergil reaches for the pocket of his washed-out and ruined blue jacket, until he pulls out a long black cord, one of the many things he picked out on the street, more akin to a very resistant type of fiber, and V immediately takes it and thanks him with a nod of his head. And well, Vergil would never have guessed to end the day with a small bird between his hands, and V repairing its broken wing. It’s quiet, terribly so, something that Vergil isn’t used to, but it’s nicer that he would have thought. It finally feels like a pause from everything else that was happening outside that door.

\- Here –, says V after finishing the work and taking the small, chirping brown bird in his hands. – It kind of looks like you now.

Vergil raises an eyebrow. – Why and how, android. Explain yourself.

The other looks down at the word “android”, but immediately regains his composure. – Well, judging by what you say, he should not be a bird anymore. He has been changed by a sort of technology somehow, but yet… He remains the same. Can I ask you a question?

\- … Go ahead.

\- You really think that becoming a perfect machine will make you less of the man you started as?

There was no malice in V’s words, only pure curiosity. And really, that is the only thing that doesn’t prompt Vergil to get up and leave the room.

He thins of fire, of the city he grew up in becoming the gritty, dark machination it is now, of everything becoming nothing but tons of steel. Of having to grow up in that, with no one at all. Of understanding how things work.

He looks in front of him, doing his best to not display anything at all. – I have my reasons to. I could ask you the same question, you know?

V stays silent for half a minute. – I apologize for the question. You were clearly shaken by it.

\- How do you know?

\- You heart rate, it accelerated. It’s a sign of discomfort and anxiety if paired with other things.

\- You learnt how to apologize, now?

\- Defective killing machine, or do you not remember? You are the one who took me from my creators.

Right. He needs a map to a certain place, a map only V – or better known as V-1T4L3, at least in the lab he found him in – has. Curiously, V had to be the perfect representation of Vergil: he worked with the Corp that created the Android, killed people for them before his mutiny, and he completely ignored the possibility of them having million and hundreds of files on him, on his style of fighting. And the best way to kill a skilled enemy who betrayed you is to make someone who could be at the very least as strong as them.

V is the result of that, the failed one, the prototype that was almost throwed in the trash piles outside of Redgrave if it wasn’t for his intelligence. But he had a defect, that everyone in the Corp valued as nothing but troublesome: he could _feel_. It started with little things: being able to form thoughts of his own, have opinions that were different from the ones implanted in him after some experience, know what affection was – and then finally, during a shooting test, their perfect Android apparently showed signs of mercy on living targets. The AI wasn’t right, V told him, so they left his creator on the street and made V the withholder of all their corporate information, including what Vergil needed. They needed to create a new AI, something that could only kill – and from what Vergil knows, that Android is close to open its eyes and see whatever became the light of day in this place.

Not that V can’t fight and actually… Vergil has to admit that when V woke up and saw the face of the man he was programmed to kill, it prompted the most difficult fight he had yet to face. It ended up with a tie, luckily, Yamato’s cutting edge on V’s throat as Vergil had a plasma pistol pointed perfectly between his eyes. And now the same bot who was about to blow his brains out has just finished repairing the broken wing of a helpless bird. How things change.

\- I did -, it’s all that Vergil replies with, as V puts the bird back in its nest. – But it’s because I have a goal, and I need you for nothing but that.

V hums, and then starts to talk again, probably to distract himself: - This is a very common house sparrow, you know? It’s also known as _passer domesticus_, of the _Passeridae_ family—

Vergil almost smiles a bit, but he bites his lower lip to stop himself. – Sometimes I think you open up that infinite library of yours in your brain just to bother me.

\- Maybe I do, who knows. – He’s smiling in a genuine way, Vergil notices that in his voice. – Did you have sparrows in Redgrave before it became like this?

\- Yes, and it seems we do now too, for how crazy that seems. When the first Corporations arrived, both fauna and flora in the city already became almost non-existent…

\- Would it be a bother if I asked you some thing of the city before it became like this? They didn’t implant any information of that in my database, and I’m desperately curious. I _want_ to know.

Vergil, once again, feels at peace – like the modern Redgrave is an old concern, something in the back of his mind for the first time instead of his survival being the top priority, and only now he notices how weird of a pair him and V are, how different he is to him in a body Vergil would have ached to possess, and how relaxed he makes him feel. V had to be the perfect copy of him, but Vergil, for a split second, considers the possibility of him being just better.

So he nods, and the Android who feels way too much to be paired with the rest of his synthetic clones is already preparing questions in his head.

And for one evening, the cyborg who abandoned his human flesh behind feels safe again.

**Author's Note:**

> follow me on @gothdatefriend where i could ramble about this au who knows!


End file.
